MOMents - Are We Done?

A few days ago when I told someone my children had been accepted to college, she exclaimed, “You’re done!”

There is a tendency to feel a giant sense of relief. It’s as if some gigantic part of our parenting job is complete.

But, is it?

If you talk to any parent just beyond this point, you will hear all sorts of stories that make it quite clear, that we are nowhere done.  We all worry that we are sending our children onto the next step without sufficient preparation.

There was the story of someone calling mom from a highway, driving with some friends to ask how to pay a toll. The tollbooth was approaching and it seemed that no one had a Fast Lane pass. What to do?

This question, by the way, from someone in an elite college who had scored impressively on the SATs.  

Or, there was the mom at the Farmer’s Market who told me her son forgot to sign up for campus housing. Or the parent who got calls from campus safety because her daughter lost her college i.d. four times during the first semester.

These are the easy situations. The ones that are much worse are like the one my husband encountered yesterday when a friend, in tears, described his son getting kicked out of his alma mater, for a year, for drinking. Another friend described getting a call from his child who had managed to become penniless in Costa Rica.

We just need to pay attention to how they behave now to see that our job is nowhere near done. One friend made a list of essential things to learn before her children flee the nest for college. Items on this list included laundry from start to finish, cooking a meal from shopping to clean up, tying a necktie and cashing a check. I might add plunging a clogged toilet to the list of essential life skills.

After all, these are children who leave their backpacks out in the rain, lose their bank cards and leave doors wide open when they leave places. A friend got a call from a kind stranger who found her daughter’s expensive dance recital costume in the middle of the road. That one left everyone scratching their heads.

It’s amazing to watch animals. Their young seem ready to find their own worms or acorns after just a short time. But we humans seem to have this parenting job for much longer. It certainly does not seem to end when that acceptance letter arrives in the mail.